Pickens Plan

Oilman T. Boone Pickens is launching an ambitious energy initiative called the Pickens Plan whereby we're going to build lots of wind power for electricity, allowing us to take natural gas out of the electricity business and use it as a transportation fuel. Joseph Romm calls the plan half brilliant and and half dumb, citing the visionary leadership on winding power but expressing serious doubts about the natural gas element.

Read Romm for full details, but the crux of the matter is that burning gas in a power plant is a lot more efficient than burning it in an internal combustion engine. Natural gas, meanwhile, is so-so on the cleanliness front. Put those two things together and an electric car getting its juice from a natural gas power plant is much cleaner than a car burning natural gas. And since our current infrastructure is already geared to using gas in power plants there's no really good reason to switch things up.

Comments

I'm not going to say his plan is a good idea, but a sentence like "an electric car getting its juice from a natural gas power plant is much cleaner than a car burning natural gas" is just dumb, considering the significant battery technology obstacles to realistic electric cars and are far from guaranteed, ever.

You might as well say "cars with a Mr. Fusion are much cleaner than cars burning oil".

Posted by lfv | July 9, 2008 12:58 PM

Yes, but does he drink your milkshake?

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | July 9, 2008 1:00 PM

It's as if Pickens had some consultant telling him that people will go for--and he can make money off of--a plan that elevates natural gas because it has the word "natural" in it. The whole thing focus grouped off the charts I'm sure. I can just see them around the board room conference table, "if only there was some way we could get everyone to call it 'organic gas' we'd have this one in the bag."

Posted by MSB | July 9, 2008 1:10 PM

Call me when he pays out on his lying-Swiftboat-Vets prize. Pickens has zero credibility.

Posted by phil | July 9, 2008 1:13 PM

People have begun developing hybrids using CNG instead of diesel for larger vehicles like transit buses, and that seems like a pretty promising idea to me. Among other things, compared to diesel CNG is more domestic, less polluting, and has gotten relative cheap as oil prices have soared.

Now of course you can make these hybrid vehicles plug-ins too where that makes sense (and better batteries would help). But unless going all-electric is a viable option, then you need something for the other component of a hybrid system, and as noted CNG seems like a reasonably promising alternative to diesel. And again unless you can go all-electric, it is besides the point to compare the efficiency of CNG used in this way to natural gas used in power plants, because we will still need something for the other part of the hybrid system (which is bound to be less efficient).

Posted by DTM | July 9, 2008 1:19 PM

Natural gas hasn't gotten any cheaper over the last few years - actually it's gotten a great deal more expensive. We're also importing more and more of it as US production fails to keep pace with demand. Also, won't wind-produced electricity require natural gas turbine backup to keep power flowing when the air is still?

Posted by TheOtherCyrus | July 9, 2008 1:29 PM

Natural gas is already fairly normal for fleet vehicles that refuel at a central location. I've seen it used for private vehicles, mostly small trucks, in other countries where the right kind of filling stations exist. Don't see why it shouldn't work in any absolute sense, although I haven't seen any analysis of how it ranks relative to other options.

I do know that EPA's auto emissions lab in Ann Arbor was looking at three kinds of alternative fuels back in the 1990s -- ethanol, methanol, and natural gas. It's hardly a new idea.

Posted by M.C. | July 9, 2008 1:35 PM

Well, I wouldn't be so sure about this. A modern
gas-fuelled combined-cycle (gas-turbine + steam-turbine) generator can run at about 60% efficiency. But then you've got electricity transmission efficiency of about 93%, and then when you charge the vehicle you've probably got battery efficiency of about 90%, and then your electric motor probably runs about 95%. So from an original 100J of combustion energy you get mechanical work of about 0.60*0.93*0.90*0.95 = 47%.

Against that, a good automobile engine can achieve perhaps 30% efficiency (well, the new Revetec gizmo claims 39% efficiency, but that's not in production yet).

But then while the efficiency favors electric vehicles, the big unsolved problem is energy storage. Current batteries are still big, heavy, and expensive. Unless and until that problem is solved, all-electric vehicles aren't viable.
EEStor claims to have ultracapacitor technology that is way better than batteries, but until we see it on the streets in volume at low cost, I'm going to remain skeptical.

I suspect that an internal-combustion engine
optimized for natural gas can probably achieve slightly higher efficiency than a gasoline engine - not such an issue achieving a good fuel/air mix and complete combustion. And on top of that the
CNG has a better carbon/hydrogen ratio so your
CO2 emissions will be lower.

On the electricity generation front, there's one
big problem with switching off the gas-fuelled generators: they're the ones that can easily and quickly adjust to changing load. Which actually makes that generating capacity more useful, and more valuable, than the raw MWatt figures would suggest. Wind and solar (thermal or PV) don't replace that (though solar will match demand for
air conditioning quite well).

All in all, this idea isn't crazy, and might be modestly useful, but it isn't going to be a huge breakthrough.

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 9, 2008 1:47 PM

I think, though the merits of this particular plan may be less than desired, that it's really encouraging to see proposals to address our dependence upon oil - however hokey they may be.

That Pickens' plan is being discussed - begs the question ... what's your plan? And is fertilizing public discussion ... I say it's a good thing.

Posted by jackifus | July 9, 2008 1:53 PM

LPG dual-fuel conversions have been subsidised in the UK for some time because there's a surplus of propane and butane from the North Sea. (Cue Hank Hill getting into the ve-hic-le business.) CNG is more efficient than LPG, but needs higher pressures.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 9, 2008 1:59 PM

Anybody here realize that North American natural gas production is in decline and that it is much more difficult and expensive to import than oil? Any switch to natural gas as a transportation fuel is destined to be short lived and require expensive infrastructure investments relative to any plausible gains.

Posted by Dmonteith | July 9, 2008 2:01 PM

I think, though the merits of this particular plan may be less than desired, that it's really encouraging to see proposals to address our dependence upon oil - however hokey they may be.

Exactly. It's a huge step up from John "let's just drill more oil!" McCain, for one.

Posted by Persia | July 9, 2008 2:11 PM

Keep promoting those cleaner, more-efficient new-technology cars, Matthew. The more attractive we make cars, the less incentive we will have to shift to the higher-density, transit-oriented lifestyles you claim to want.

Posted by Mixner | July 9, 2008 2:14 PM

You wouldn't necessarily have to burn the natural gas. You could instead use the natural gas to make hydrogen for use in fuel cell cars. Obviously that requires the fuel cell cars to exist, along with the infrastructure to fuel them, etc. But that way when the natural gas gets too expensive you could switch to another method of producing hydrogen (like using some of the wind power for electrolysis, maybe), without having to change your transportation infrastructure again.

I'm actually not personally sold on the whole hydrogen thing, but just throwing it out there.

Posted by Douglas Beach | July 9, 2008 2:19 PM

Re lfv

I posted a link to this article a few days ago but it's worthwhile posting it again since Mr. lfv apparently is unaware of this new technology.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html

These researchers claim a 10 fold increase in electric storage capacity for this technology which would make electric cars competitive with current vehicles.

Posted by SLC | July 9, 2008 2:35 PM

"You could instead use the natural gas to make hydrogen for use in fuel cell cars."

Hydrogen cars have the same problem as electric cars: energy storage capacity. Hydrogen is tricky stuff to deal with: low density, diffuses away really quickly, can't be liquefied without extreme (and thus expensive) temperature/pressure.

The more I study this, the more I think that gasoline is great stuff for transportation, and mostly we need to focus on building more efficient vehicles - better engines, smaller/lighter cars, better aerodynamics, hybrid technology to allow the ICE (or gas turbine ...) to operate at peak efficiency. VW are going to produce a 2-person vehicle which gets 300mpg, all by making it small, light (~ 600lb), and highly aerodynamic. Most of our automotive gasoline gets used to push air around and accelerate 2500lb+ of car just to move 200lb of driver.

Of course any steps in that direction will be fiercely resisted by GM/Ford/Chrysler. But they won't be around much longer ...

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 9, 2008 2:36 PM

I'm going to have to disagree with you about the viability of natural gas as a fuel source for transportation. I think it has a number of things going for it:

#1 The vast majority of the pollution is created at the site where it is mined, not where it is expended. For urban areas with bad pollution, this is great. Sure, the environmental cost is basically being externalized, but externalized to a place where it has less ill effects on the health of a large population.

#2 The infrastructure is already in place, in your home. Buy a Civic GX, and you can fill it from your home's gas line overnight. For millions of commuters, this is much more convenient than having to go to a gas station.

#3 There is a network of filling stations already in place in most urbanized areas, because many bus fleets run on CNG. Cities just have to open these up to the general public.

#4 While most private houses have a gas lines, my prediction is that most people will add geothermal systems to their houses in the coming years. It's very economical and the upfront cost can be rolled into a mortgage, where it will cost you far less than you'll save per month. This should create downward pricing pressure on natural gas, and prevent a dramatic increase in its price if we start to use it more widely as a transportation fuel.

Posted by nirad | July 9, 2008 2:44 PM

The typical estimate seems to be that wind could provide up to 20% of electrical power without its variability being much of an issue. Solar thermal has a reasonable shot at storage, of the heat it uses for generation, which would smooth out its generating capacity.

If consumers of electricity (like refrigerators) were "smarter" about their consumption, and could draw more when more is available, this would smooth out demand; a natural scheme would be to vary the price of electricity, and have appliances etc. respond to price.

Plugin hybrids, or all-electric cars, are coming, and they also can play out a role in smoothing out demand, and also maybe in being reserve batteries.

Pickens motivates his plan by the urgency of reducing dependence on foreign oil, and finds it convenient to swap in domestic natural gas as a replacement. As Romm points out, the latter doesn't make a lot of sense. But, it's great that Pickens is talking up wind, and putting his money where his mouth is. (And if Pickens profits from government-installed transmission capacity, well, so be it.) Also, it's good to bring up that hidden cost of oil: the wars, now and in the future, motivated by it.

Posted by Ken C. | July 9, 2008 2:48 PM

"my prediction is that most people will add geothermal systems to their houses in the coming years."

Good point. We talk a lot about gasoline and transportation, but we should also be talking about home heating and cooling: air conditioning is a major use of electricity, oil or gas-fired heating is a major use of fossil fuels. And there's much room for improvement in all of this: first by building small homes instead of 6000sf McMansions; second by green building (no draughts, good insulation, good windows, trees for shade); and third by using modest investments in technologies which already exist - heat pumps using the constant-50F soil temperature are probably a great investment.

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 9, 2008 3:00 PM

Pickens has been on CNBC a few times to promote this plan. When asked about alternatives such as plug-in hybrids or solar energy he says he's fine with using them. He just thinks that the quickest method is the one he's promoting. He also is all for conservation, at least in these appearances. As far as natural gas's longevity that is an issue but it can be dealt with on an ongoing basis.

I think the fact that this plan is based substantially around wind and natural gas, as opposed to coal and nuclear, presents a great opportunity for Greens to get on board.

Also, I requested comment on this in another thread. Come on mention my request. :P

Posted by crack | July 9, 2008 3:01 PM

I'd like to be able to heat my home in winter without competing for fuel with every driver in America, thanks.

Posted by Brittain33 | July 9, 2008 3:02 PM

Yes, but does he drink your milkshake?

No, but I heard it brings the boys to the yard.

Posted by Dilan Esper | July 9, 2008 3:10 PM

Richard: While hydrogen does have "low energy density," fuel cells are incredibly efficient. The Honda fuel cell car's "tank" only holds the energy equivalent of four gallons of gasoline, but it gets the equivalent of 68 mpg, so it has a range of 270 miles. That's pretty good for what can barely be considered a first generation product.

Again, I'm not sold on hydrogen, believing that plug-in hybrids are probably a better path, but hydrogen from natural gas is a plausible transportation fuel. Amory Lovins likes it, and he's smarter than I am.

Posted by Douglas Beach | July 9, 2008 3:10 PM

"Richard: While hydrogen does have "low energy density," fuel cells are incredibly efficient."

I'm a skeptic about fuel cells. It seems that technology has been around a long time without ever becoming cheap and robust. Getting around the efficiency limits of heat engines seems like a great thing, but then in practice it never really seems to work out so well.

But perhaps fuel cells would work better if we could run them at a constant load and use an ultracapacitor to cope with brief bursts of acceleration/deceleration.

There are a lot of potentially interesting technologies around: but there's a big gap between what works in a prototype, and what can be manufactured in 1M+ volumes and work for 10 years. My gut feeling is that variants of internal combustion engine are still going to dominate for the next 20 years. But I could be wrong.

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 9, 2008 3:25 PM

I am just happy that someone like Pickens is proposing "green" ideas. Sometimes you have to take what you can get from conservative Southwestern oilmen who are actually willing to think green. To me, Pickens is sounding remarkably progressive for someone with his background.

Posted by Fletcher | July 9, 2008 3:53 PM

My motto is to ALWAYS trust a guy named T. Boone Pickens, so I say lets go for it.

Posted by Adrock | July 9, 2008 4:00 PM

>Joseph Romm calls the plan half brilliant and and half dumb

He's half-right!

Good luck taking natural gas out of electric generation. Unless you really do want to build more coal plants than China.

People upset with triple digit car fill-ups will flip when they get four-digit annual electric bills.

Posted by bartkid | July 9, 2008 4:09 PM

Nanotech is likely to solve the energy storage/battery issue.

It would help if the US spent less money on attacking oil-rich countries and diverted some of that money to nanotech energy research.

ZAP, Advanced Battery to expand nanotech battery research
http://www.automotive-business-review.com/article_news.asp?guid=F4C5B5F0-EFF2-4CBE-B7AB-19E244542638

Nanotech will let us wear batteries and get 150 mpg
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/robotics/2007-03-15-batteries_N.htm

Nanotech: Up and Atom
http://www.alternet.org/environment/19812

The key to solving the biggest challenge of today could be small – very small – technology. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley says the impending world energy shortage requires several miracles of science that nanotechnology can help to deliver...

By 2050, the world will need at least twice the current amount of energy being produced today, he said. The current consumption of energy, equivalent to 210 million barrels of oil per day, would have to be increased to at least 450 million barrels to support the world's growing population. And that energy production must not increase pollution.

Nuclear reactors will not provide enough energy to provide for a hydrogen economy, and relying on coal would only increase the real problem of greenhouse gas emissions, Smalley noted, adding, "If you have been in C02 denial, take another look."

Carbon Spinning

But Smalley's call for better breathing through chemistry recognizes many challenges. Scientists would need to use nanotechnology to create home storage systems for hydrogen as well as a new material to replace copper wiring and allow electricity to be sent great distances. Smalley and his fellow researchers at Rice are working on a new carbon "spinning" process that would create a polymer material that will be one-sixth the weight of copper with the same conductivity and have the same strength as steel.

This material could be used to send electricity over great distances, such as from solar farms in the southwest to New York City. "We could be transferring 1000 gigawatts at pennies per gigawatt," he said, explaining that if the conversion of solar energy to electricity could be made more efficient by a factor of 10, large solar farms in six areas of the globe could provide all of the world's required electricity.

Smalley described how nanotechnology can also be used to create "super batteries" for storing hydrogen at homes or businesses to avoid using the electricity grid at peak times of demand. Temporary storage is needed because solar and wind provide energy only intermittently. The batteries for an average home would be about the size of a washing machine and cost less than $1,000.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | July 9, 2008 5:09 PM

I think there was general misunderstanding of T Boones proposal. His main interest is to push high plains (even if he said midwest) wind, and the transmission infrastructure needed to support it. If we had the wind capacity, some natural gas currently used for baseline power would be displaced. (Some NG would still be needed to overcome windpower supply gaps.) It is that displaced NG, not hypothetical new sources of NG that he proposes using for transportation. That is not a bad idea, although it has much less efficient thermodynamically than plugin vehicles. He makes a valid point that plugins will not be available in the sort of numbers needed soon enough. I am a firm believer in electrification of transport, but the time frame for that to happen is longer than what T Boone has proposed. North American NG supply is a bit of an unknown, unconventional NG production is doing better than expected, and we can probably maintain roughly our current consumption for a decade or two. Unlike plugins, compressed natural gas vehicles could be manufactured in numbers today (in some countries they already are). They have shorter range than gasoline/diesel vehicles, but as long as NG remains cheaper than oil there will be an economic incentive to use them.

Not nearly as bad a proposal as some make it out to be. Not a final long term solution, as NG will likely go in short supply, but supply can probably hold up for the lifetime of a single generation of NG vehicles, by then plugins and electric should be ready to take over. NG would still be used for electricity, -it is often used for peak power today. NG used to tide over gaps in wind (or solar) supply is a good match, and probably will be a lot more practical than trying to store wind or solar power.

Posted by bigTom | July 9, 2008 6:30 PM

"Nanotech is likely to solve the energy storage/battery issue."

Any time you see a sentence with the word "nanotech", you might as well replace it with "magical pixie dust". It's been vastly overhyped, and while it's an interesting field for blue-skies research, don't hold your breath waiting for massive breakthrough products.

I'd bet the average car of 2028 is going to look pretty much like the average car of 2008, just a little smaller and lighter, and with a smarter internal combustion engine. But I'll bet it still has pistons, probably spark plugs, and runs on hydrocarbon fossil fuel.

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 9, 2008 7:17 PM

I'd bet the average car of 2028 is going to look pretty much like the average car of 2008, just a little smaller and lighter, and with a smarter internal combustion engine. But I'll bet it still has pistons, probably spark plugs, and runs on hydrocarbon fossil fuel.

Right. All those hybrid vehicles that are already on the market are just a figment of our imagination. As are all the additional hybrid models scheduled to go on sale within the next two or three years. And the plug-in hybrids currently in development too. The idea that the average car of 2028 will be remotely similar to the average car of 2008 is absurd. Even if gasoline is still the primary fuel source twenty years from now, the engines and powertrains will be radically different from the "average" car of today. Even inexpensive cars will likely have vastly more sophisticated and capable automation. This will greatly improve safety, navigation and efficiency. More and more driving tasks will be taken over by automated systems. I would be surprised if there is not at least one fully-automatic vehicle on sale by 2028, capable of autonomous operation in any driving environment.

Posted by Mixner | July 9, 2008 7:39 PM

"Right. All those hybrid vehicles that are already on the market are just a figment of our imagination."

So far they sell in rather insignificant volumes -
around 100K/year for all the hybrids together compared to 10M+ for the whole market. And the recent hybrids, other than the Prius, seem to emphasize power rather than efficiency: in fact to such an extent that a good pure-ICE vehicle, e.g. a turbodiesel, can achieve the same efficiency. So that seems like a big cost for little or no gain.

Maybe hybrids will become dominant: but it sure hasn't happened yet, and I'm very aware of upcoming ICE developments which seem equally promising. Will those be "radically different" ? As I said, probably not - they'll have pistons and sparkplugs and ECMs and fuel injection and probably even crankshafts. About the most radical possibility is all-electronic camless valves. But apart fromthe electronics they'd be pretty familiar to Otto or Benz.

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 9, 2008 8:03 PM

"The idea that the average car of 2028 will be remotely similar to the average car of 2008 is absurd."

Oh yeah ? What changed between 1988 and 2008 ?
Not much: better EFI, better emissions control, turbochargers on upmarket models but not on most cars.

"Even if gasoline is still the primary fuel source twenty years from now, the engines and powertrains will be radically different from the "average" car of today."

I call bullshit. There are only so many ways to skin a cat: right now we have very highly-evolved manual and automatic gearboxes, together with a few belt-drive CVTs starting to compete. Those are technologies which have been around for 50 years or more. People do come up with new ideas, but hardly any of them can match the combination of efficiency and low cost of the incumbent technologies.

"Even inexpensive cars will likely have vastly more sophisticated and capable automation"

No, they won't. At least not in the USA, because anything you automate is a potential safety hazard and product-liability lawsuit. Anyway, the whole robotics/AI area is another field that has been massively overhyped: humans do a remarkably good job of gathering sight and sound data and planning and executing the necessary actions to drive a car safely; automatic systems to do much of that are still far off (e.g. see this year's DARPA Grand Challenge, to try to automate simple driving in a city environment).

Anyhow, who cares about the cars ? We'll all have personal jetpacks and we'll be living in orbiting condos financed with subprime loans.

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 9, 2008 8:29 PM

Correction: hybrid sales last year were about 350K,
that's about 2.2% of the market. Still only a small niche so far.

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 9, 2008 8:32 PM

Richard Cownie: And you base your criticism of nanotech on what? Your advanced degree in bullshit?

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | July 9, 2008 11:28 PM

I disagree with Matt's take on the natural gas side of things. It seems as good as anything else proposed. The interesting thing is that Pickens knows this is a stop-gap - he's under no delusions that we can run our auto fleet on natural gas forever. He's suggesting a measure to free up our natural gas for temporary use in autos while electric vehicles come into full force. So in the end, Pickens and Matt seem to have the same goal - get our cars onto the larger, more efficient electric grid. Pickens is proposing the natural gas swap as a measure to relieve some of the pressure in a fairly short time frame.

If he's investing in getting a sizable portion of our electric grid onto wind power, I'm not going to argue too much about the particulars. By the time we get a lot of wind power up and running, we may have a different set of options available to us that we decide to use instead of natural gas power cars.

Posted by B. Minich | July 9, 2008 11:29 PM

"Richard Cownie: And you base your criticism of nanotech on what? Your advanced degree in bullshit?"

I've been hearing big claims for 15 years or so: and what has actually got to market ? Not much, as this paragraph from wikipedia says:

"National Science Foundation (a major source of funding for nanotechnology in the United States) funded researcher David Berube to study the field of nanotechnology. His findings are published in the monograph “Nano-Hype: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz". This published study (with a foreword by Mihail Roco, Senior Advisor for Nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation) concludes that much of what is sold as “nanotechnology” is in fact a recasting of straightforward materials science, which is leading to a “nanotech industry built solely on selling nanotubes, nanowires, and the like” which will “end up with a few suppliers selling low margin products in huge volumes." Further applications which require actual manipulation or arrangement of nanoscale components await further research. Though technologies branded with the term 'nano' are sometimes little related to and fall far short of the most ambitious and transformative technological goals of the sort in molecular manufacturing proposals, the term still connotes such ideas. Thus there may be a danger that a "nano bubble" will form, or is forming already, from the use of the term by scientists and entrepreneurs to garner funding, regardless of interest in the transformative possibilities of more ambitious and far-sighted work."

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 9, 2008 11:45 PM

Look, stupid, the nanotech people are fully aware that there really is no such thing as a "nanotech industry" per se. Nanotech is an enabling technology which is applied to other industries.

Nobody in nanotechnology denies that we don't have general purpose assemblers or even in many or even most cases any kind of self-assembling is being done currently.

Not to mention that nobody ever said we'd have general purpose assemblers in the next few years.

The nanotech people aren't "hyping" anything. The reality is that nanotechnologies are growing in applications at a 30% per year rate, last I saw. Applications are coming to market.

But as the Wikipedia entry correctly points out, most of them won't be seen as "nanotechnology" even if they are. They will be seen as materials science or biotechnology or chemical engineering or whatever.

Nanotech is following Kurzweil's principle: in the first few decades of a technology, it appears progress is linear, even when it is in fact exponential. It's only later in the process that major advances that are truly significant are made. This has happened in every major field and it will happen in nanotech.

What you're seen in the last fifteen years is irrelevant. Probably what you'll see in the next fifteen years is irrelevant. It's what you will likely see in the following fifteen years and beyond that will be more than relevant.

Expect nothing terribly significant before 2025 - then expect earth-shaking changes by 2050 - and the elimination of humans in favor of Transhumans by 2075 or 2100.

There will naturally be "speed bumps" along the way, as nothing proceeds perfectly well along the curve. Kurzweil demonstrates this in his lectures. You look at the year to year changes, things go up and down. The overall curve - exponential.

But we won't get that curve as fast as we might if we don't put in the effort. Spending three to five trillion dollars on Iraq - and more on Iran - is hardly desirably compared to putting even a fraction of that money into nanotech research.

Professor Smalley says that his nanotech energy initiative could be financed by a mere ten cents tax on a gallon of gas for the first decade or so, then rising to 20 cents later. I'd say that's a small price to pay for the possible benefits if he's right.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | July 10, 2008 3:38 AM

"Expect nothing terribly significant before 2025 - then expect earth-shaking changes by 2050 - and the elimination of humans in favor of Transhumans by 2075 or 2100."

You're trying to convince us it isn't all hype, and
then you tell us it's going to produce "earth-shaking changes by 2050". More hype.

It's the same kind of BS as we heard about AI in the 1970s. Some fields get hyped, they promise great things, get lots of research money, and then hit fundamental obstacles and deliver little.

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 10, 2008 8:59 AM

Re Richard Cownie

Mr. Cownie apparently didn't bother and visit the article I linked to relative to research at Stanford, Un. on the application of nanotechnology to advanced storage batteries. Therefore, I will post it again for his edification. This is in addition to the links posted by Mr. Hack.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html

Now Mr. Cownie is rightfully skeptical about this technology. However, there is a discussion on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast about this article. Dr. Novella and his brothers who host the podcast are also professional skeptics but their take is rather more positive then is that of Mr. Cownie. A link to the subject podcast is attached.

http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2008-07-02.mp3

Posted by SLC | July 10, 2008 10:40 AM

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Posted by Joe | July 10, 2008 11:20 AM

TAKE DECISIVE ACTION NOW on Energy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What is Decisive Action?

Well… the ONLY Action that will get us out of this mess… The Dependence on Foreign Oil that is and will continue to DESTROY our Economy and Country. Plus HIGH and going HIGHER ENERGY PRICES is to…

DO EVERYTHING NOW! EVERYTHING!!!!!! RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!

Conservation – Important part… but will NOT solve Problem by itself!

Open UP all Areas NOW off limits to OIL DRILLING and I mean ALL: Deep water Continental Shelf, Anwar and Shale!

DRILL… DRILL… DRILL... for OIL and NATURAL GAS in an environmentally safe way! This can be done safely… it is done safely everywhere else in the World! In Fact China will soon drill off our coast... thanks to Cuba.

Develop Clean COAL Technology and other coal technologies

Biofuels.. all forms should move forward… NOT just Corn.

WIND

Hybrid’s Auto’s and Natural Gas Auto’s. All types of hybrid’s should be pursued!

SOLAR

HYDRO

NUCULAR – Why haven’t we built a Nuclear Power Plant in the last 30 Years??? Why??? Ask you local representatives… Why??? Who Blocks this clean, cheap energy??? Who???

Other New Energy sources… yet to be found.

The Government should Take ALL the Barriers out of the way for every Idea to move forward FAST!!!!! GOVERNMENT and POLITICIANS get out of the way NOW!!!!!!!

We ALL need to force our elected representatives to take ACTION NOW on ALL Forms of Energy Sources!

Read How on this webpage: www.jdsannuities.com/_5__gas___help

or copy and paste this link to your addres bar: http://www.jdsannuities.com/_5__gas___help

Is $4.00++ per Gallon Gasoline KILLING your Budget?
Have your Electric Bills gone UP materially so far this summer?
Wait until you see your Heating Bills this Winter!!!!!!

We the People will be heard!

Posted by Joe | July 10, 2008 11:23 AM

"Mr. Cownie apparently didn't bother and visit the article I linked to relative to research at Stanford,"

It's about what I expect - a possibly-useful phenomenon discovered by academic researchers, and they're thinking about trying to commercialize it. But like most of these "breakthrough" ideas, anyone with a modestly scientific background and a skeptical disposition can think of a whole host of possible issues which might keep it out of products:

1) Can you make it in volume ?

2) Can you make it cheaply ?

3) Is the microstructure at all susceptible to
heat/vibration/high currents/charge-cycling or any combination ?

4) Does it depend on high purity materials ? Is it vulnerable to contamination ?

There are a zillion ideas that look promising under laboratory conditions but can't make it as high-volume low-cost real-world products.

In fact when I look at the history of technology over the last 100 years, what strikes me most is how many of the changes are incremental improvements of existing technologies, rather than breakthrough inventions by academics. We still mostly make electricity by burning fossil fuels and driving big gas and steam radial turbines; we mostly transport stuff using internal-combustion piston engines which are refinements of the 19th-century Otto or Diesel engines. The development of transistors/ICs/computers/telecoms is the biggest exception: but most of the other stuff has been around a long time.

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 10, 2008 11:40 AM

Re Richard Cownie

Al of Mr Cownies' objections are well taken. However, I would suggest that Mr. Cownie listen to the podcast, a link to which I posted, in which Dr. Novellas' brother, who, unlike Mr. Cownie, did a considerable amount of research on the topic before running his mouth, indicates that the proposed technology appears not to be pie in the sky. I would point out that the Novella brothers (Dr. Steven Novella is president of the New England Skeptical Society) are long time skeptics and the fact that they are impressed by the article speaks volumes to me.

Posted by SLC | July 10, 2008 12:21 PM

There is a public Forum for discussions about Pickens plan :
www.pickensenergyplan.com
Cheers.

Posted by scotty | July 10, 2008 12:42 PM

"I would suggest that Mr. Cownie listen to the podcast"

As befits a technology skeptic, I don't have
multimedia capabilities on my desktop machine.

Anyhow, I'm not really saying this particular trick
is "pie in the sky": just that there are probably 100 such ideas in academic labs for every one that gets into products. If they're really lucky and everything goes well, then they'll have it in cellphones and laptops 5 years from now - applications where you don't have to worry about the extremes of heat/vibration/dirt/high power surges/
long lifetime; and if *that* step goes brilliantly well then maybe, just maybe, they might have something suitable for automotive power 10 years from now. But I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 10, 2008 1:49 PM

Re Richard Cownie

The podcast can be downloaded and played on any media player that will play an mp3 file, e.g. Itunes, free from Apple, Windows Media Player, free from Microsoft, Real Media Player, free from
Real Networks, VLC player, free from Videolan, etc. Of course, if Mr. Cownies' computer doesn't have a soundboard, he can use a program like Itunes to burn a music file to a CD and play it back on any CD player. The VLC player also is available for several LINUX systems and the source code is available for compilation and linking on other systems (e.g. Solaris).

Mr. Cownie has no excuse.

Posted by SLC | July 10, 2008 3:58 PM

"Mr. Cownie has no excuse."

Well, with 5 minutes googling I can find plenty of information about lithium-ion technology: including the highly relevant fact that squeezing more lithium into one electrode won't help much unless you can also squeeze more into the other electrode, so at best this is only half the solution ...

I'm not really a fan of audio and video: the information density tends to be low.

Posted by Richard Cownie | July 10, 2008 5:47 PM